The role of trust in international cooperation in crisis areas:
a comparison of German and US-American NGO partnership strategies
Our trainer Mrs. Ulrike Schwegler discusses the role of trust in international cooperations in crisis areas by drawing a comparison between german and american NGO partnerstrategies.
The globalized nature of modern organizations presents new and intimidating challenges for effective relationship building. Organizations and their employees are increasingly being asked to manage unfamiliar relationships with unfamiliar parties. These relationships not only involve working across different national cultures, but also dealing with different organizational cultures, different professional cultures and even different internal constituencies.
Managing such differences demands trust. This detailed study examines trust-building processes in German and US-American non-governmental organizations facing the challenges of cooperation and partnership building in international crisis areas.
We give you a short general summary of results of the study:
To avoid creating islands of success, NGOs need to engage and maintain relationships, and join a global trend toward trans- organizational partnerships with trust as the “central mechanism to allow for an efficient solution to the problem of co-coordinating.
Another conclusion is that a strong mechanism allowing NGOs to coordinate with each other, as well as with sponsoring GOs, is presently lacking. The research has shown that NGOs currently lack the necessary flexible mechanism to partner effectively across cultural, organizational and hierarchical divisions. Moreover the study shows that most NGOs lack the “internationality” necessary to form lasting, strategic alliances.
Furthermore complex organizational structures, preferences for exiting practice, diffused decision-making and the mixture of implementing and non-implementing organizational foci stand in the way of partnership development.
Lastly, NGOs lack the time, resources and supra-structures necessary to nurture the culture-specific trust required for effective partnerships.
The challenge is to harness the combined social capital in the form of contacts and relationships with communities and other organizations that all NGOs possess and turn it into a coordinated resource. The goal should be facilitating coordination- and that will then become best practise
from: Smith, L.R. / Schwegler, U. (2010): The role of trust in International co-operation in crisis areas: a comparison of German-and US-American NGO partnership strategies. In: M. Saunders/D. Skinner/N. Gillespie/G. Dietz/R. Lewicki (Eds.): Organisational trust: a cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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The role of trust in international cooperation in crisis areas:
a comparison of German and US-American NGO partnership strategies...
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